Monday, May 31, 2010

I love the moon & it's effect on us. I love flying. I love jets. I love blue. I love photography. I love words. I love combining them all.

Yet, despite thinking about it dozens of time, I've not made a concerted effort to capture one of those beautiful images when a plane crosses in front of the moon.

The early rising moon, visible at blue hour times the day after my birthday, was not full but the day was cooler than usual.

Sitting on my deck, I saw a jet high in the sky to my right reflecting the falling sunlight with shiny contrails.

I quickly stepped in to grab the Nikon D300 camera. No time to check settings. No time to swap to the 300mm (450mm equiv) lens. No time to change settings from JPG to RAW for a greater detail picture.

I simply shot a couple of quick images while managing to keep both plane and moon in the handheld shot at full 200mm (300mm equiv) zoom.

Air at that level must have had an upward flow, giving the jet's vapor trail an upward drift, giving it the look of a Japanese brush stroke.

With the pale bright moon and the shiny jet plane almost perfectly balanced in the bottom right and top left one-thirds points, I was happy to capture this moment, not Made In Japan. I had Jet. Blue. Moon. Light. Flight.

Jet Blue Moonlight Moonflight.

I hope to capture one closer to a full moon, with a 300/450mm lens on a tripod with camera RAW but can't predict when that will be.

Wednesday, May 26, 2010

My late beloved Father, Anwaruddin (1932-2008), took this photo of me in Montgomery (now Sahiwal), Pakistan, for my birthday in 1964. Having only a 2" print, I scanned it in to post today, on my birthday.

Munna is a popular nickname for "little boy" in Urdu, and that is what I was called as the Mini-Me you see above.

My beloved Mother put those shades on me, not just to be cool :-) but because just a few days earlier I had fallen on broken glass and nearly lost my left eye. You can see the hair shaved off above the wound area to keep it from falling in my eye or irritating the area. The stiches' scar is still listed as my major identification mark in travel documents.

This one's dedicated to you Abu. Your passion for appreciating beauty and photography I will carry with me to the end of my travel through this life.